GPAC, Open Source Media Player, Now Supports HEVC for use by Service Providers and Broadcasters to Accelerate Experimentation of the New Codec
ATEME, a global leader in advanced video compression solutions for the broadcast industry, announced the industry’s first open source implementation of a software media player supporting High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is now available. Service providers and broadcasters are able to accelerate experimentation of the new HEVC Codec standard in the field.
GPAC is an open source media player that can be used to playback live or file-based audio and video content, and also to encapsulate and transmit such content as a stream. Those functionalities are now extended to files or streams encoded with HEVC, the latest video compression format standardized by ITU as H.265.
Jean Le Feuvre, Associate Professor at Telecom ParisTech, France and project leader for GPAC, commented: “GPAC has become an indispensable test bed for a broad range of experiments within our multimedia research projects. With this breakthrough HEVC feature set, we expect that GPAC will also serve the needs of content providers and telecom operators who wish to explore what the new codec can accomplish for their business – whether it is a reduction in bandwidth, or quality enhancements using the same bandwidth.”
GPAC has been validated with a 1080p High Definition content delivery chain. Work is now ongoing to extend the use cases to Ultra High Definition.
“The support of HEVC in GPAC is a milestone for the broadcast industry, allowing us to move from relatively static demonstrations of the new codec to much broader and more meaningful field trials. ATEME has been an early supporter of HEVC features in GPAC and took an active part in the integration effort because this will help our clients assess the performance of our TITAN product line in HEVC” said Jerome Vieron, Advanced Research Manager at ATEME.
The TITAN File and Live transcoder with support for HEVC, used in combination with the GPAC player, will be on display in the ATEME booth #SU7102, in the NAB Show South Upper hall of the Las Vegas Conference Center, April 8-11, 2013.
NEWS FACTS:
ATEME, IETR and Telecom ParisTech actively collaborated for the open-source development of an HEVC test-bed, featuring an HEVC/H.265 decoder, OpenHEVC, its integration in GPAC along with upgrade of transport tools for HEVC, and the end-to-end testing of the new feature set. The test bed is currently running on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux operating systems. This cooperation is part of the 4Ever collaborative research project.
The OpenHEVC decoder is a project led by Mickaël RAULET, Research Engineer at the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications Rennes (IETR) laboratory. The decoder, distributed under LGPL license, supports HEVC main profile; its performance enables GPAC to play up 1080p resolution and 25 or 30 frames per second on a single core CPU. More information is available at https://github.com/OpenHEVC/.
GPAC is an open source framework for packaging, distribution and playback of interactive multimedia, distributed under the terms of the LGPL license. GPAC tools enable both encapsulation and playback of HEVC bitstreams in MPEG-2 TS and ISO Base Media File (ISOBMF also known as .mp4), according to the ISO specifications under finalization by the Motion Picture Experts Group. The resulting content can be locally played back or used for testing purposes, or can be delivered live, from a pre-encoded bitstream, for transmission chain prototyping. MPEG-2 TS based broadcasts can be generated over IP unicast or multicast. GPAC can also provide OTT distribution using MPEG-DASH in either MPEG-2 TS or ISOBMF container formats for either live or on demand playback of HEVC content. More information on GPAC is available at http://gpac.sourceforge.net/
About Telecom ParisTech
Telecom ParisTech is the leading French graduate engineering school in Information and Communication Technology. With about 1300 students, 330 PhD and 180 full-time researchers, Telecom ParisTech research builds upon the major disciplines of digital communications, electronics, computer science and engineering, networks, digital signal and image processing and the economics of information systems.
About IETR
Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications of Rennes (IETR) undertakes research in information and communication science and technology. Research teams from INSA-Rennes, the University of Rennes 1, Supélec and the University of Nantes staff the IETR Joint Research Unit. Research areas are Antennas and Microwaves, Radar Propagation Communications and Communications systems, an Imaging and Remote Sensing.
About ATEME
ATEME is a world leading provider of HEVC / H.265, MPEG-4 / H.264 and MPEG-2 bandwidth efficient compression technology. ATEME encoding solutions are deployed widely for broadcast contribution links, distribution, multi-screen live streaming, OTT and VOD applications. More information is available at www.ateme.com.
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